The vast majority of today's computing devices such as personal computers, tablets, and smartphones include advanced user-facing and world-facing cameras, various microphones, and potentially various other input/output (I/O) devices. Although such devices generally enhance the user's experience and increasingly offer users advanced capabilities in quite small form factors, the presence of such input/output devices opens a new attack surface for hackers and/or spyware (e.g., to monitor the user in his or her surroundings without the user's knowledge). For example, a hacker may gain unauthorized access to a camera or microphone of a particular computing device through an application installed by the user or by virtue of various viruses or rogue software. It should be appreciated that unauthorized access to input/output devices may have a major impact on a user's privacy and potentially grievous security implications in the context of an enterprise or military environment. Although some software-based mechanisms exist to reduce such hacking, software-based solutions are prone to compromise by other software agent or viruses, are frequently disabled, and are generally useless when a particular device is in a low-power or sleep state.